Bloody Cavemen

William Golding's *Lord of the Flies* (1954) was written as a deliberate critique of R.M. Ballantyne's *The Coral Island* (1857), inverting the Victorian myth of innocent English boyhood by depicting schoolboy castaways descending into violence and savagery. After facing numerous rejections from publishers, Golding finally submitted the manuscript to Faber & Faber in September 1953, where it was initially dismissed by an in-house reader as "absurd & uninteresting fantasy." The novel would eventually become required reading for British and American schoolchildren, replacing Ballantyne's work as a postwar meditation on human nature.